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Are we facing a new American-Israeli attack against the issue of the Palestinian refugees and the right of return to the properties and homes from which the Palestinians have been displaced since 1948? What raises this question is what we noticed last week through two important incidents:
The first one is the draft resolution presented by U.S Congressman Mark Kirk and adopted by the Budget Committee of the council, which reconsiders the U.S funding for the UNRWA for its role in the resettlement of the Palestinians where they are residing. Kirk sees that the UNRWA has not done what it is entitled to do in passing the projects of the resettlement of the Palestinians. “It is to be noted that the task of the Agency is limited to providing services to the first generation of the Palestinian refugees and not their offspring. Only who left in 1948 are the refugees who deserve the services of the Agency, but those who were born outside Palestine are not refugees. Consequently, the countries where they were born must give them citizenship” said Kirk. Thus, the number of the Palestinian refugees reduces from 5 million to 70-75 thousand. Since these refugees are elderly, the UNRWA must cancel other services such as schools, institutes, clinics of pregnant and babies, youth centers, loan programs and other services. The Agency should only give some medical services to patients who suffer from heart diseases and blood pressure; that is to say, those diseases which hit old people, which means the reduction of the medical body and the gradual termination of the Agency services and the end of its role with the death of the last Palestinian refugee borne in Palestine. After that, the Agency is no longer needed and the refugees issue will be over. As Kirk put it, “elderly people die and their sons and daughters can become citizens in the host countries”.
Israeli press resources confirm that Kirk’s draft, which was approved by Congress Budget Committee, had been worded in consultation with the Israeli departments with the aim of besieging the Agency, since the U.S is the largest financer of the UNRWA. The policy of the White House and the State Department calls for maintaining the agency and not provoking the Palestinian refugees until a certain resolution outside the right of return is reached, which is close to Clinton’s criteria and Dead Sea document which drop the right of return and give a permanent residence to the Palestinians where they are living, considering this a practical implementation to resolution 194. When this is implemented, all additional demands are not accepted.
The second event is what “Israel Today” newspaper stated on 14/6/2012 by Smadar Perry. She suddenly recalled what she called “massacre” committed against the Iraqi Jews in Bagdad in 1941. The author elaborately explains the facts of this massacre and draws the attention that it happened before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which means that the Arabs hated and still hate the Jews. Perry starts with this massacre in order to talk about racial campaigns waged by the Arabs against the Israelis and how they were obliged to migrate away from their properties and money to Israel which provided peace and security to the prosecuted Jews who were the victim of anti-Semitisms.
What makes an Israeli journalist look for an uncertain event and offer it as a massacre against the Jews in order to talk about a racist war waged by the Arabs against the Jews, which forced them to immigrate to Israel?
Perry pretended to have forgotten the troubled situation in Palestine and the clashes between the Palestinian farmers and the Jewish immigrants who came to illegally seize their land. She also turned a blind eye to the British occupation and how it bloodily repressed the revolution of 1936-1939, which left hard effects on the Palestinian body, and how much the British occupation was lenient with the Jews, and how it helped the establishment of an Israeli state on the Palestinian land at the expense of the Palestinian national entity.
We believe that shedding light on these alleged events aims to equalize between what happened by the Arabs against the Jews and the Jews massacres against the Palestinians and he held the Arabs responsible for instigating the confrontation and adopting the policy of massacres. Many Israeli massacres happened in the contest of the Arab Israeli war. Yet, Perry tries to justify them to his readers.
There might be no coordination between Kirk and Perry, and the two events happened by chance. However, this does not negate the existence of a special American-Israeli interest in the issue of the Palestinian refugees, which neither America nor Europe could bypass or ignore. We add nothing if we say this is the most sensitive and hottest issue in the accounts of the Western circles. This means that the western circles will never stop aborting this issue and the right of return, especially that these circles remarkably notice that the refugees issue is widening more and more and the refugees are adhering to the right of return more than before, and the next anniversary of the nakba (catastrophe) will attract more participants.
Source: Al-Hourriah Via DFLP
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